Peek-A-Boo Parenting

Between the Asphalt and the Paver

I have a very small 4’ x 5’ garden between my front door and my garage. I always plant Impatience there in the spring. They thrive in the shade and don’t need much water. I love their colors and happy faces. This year a seed must have blown over from the garden and landed between the asphalt and garden wall. Moss is growing in this small in between space with very little soil. From my perspective, a desert for flowers as the car is always pulling in and out with its exhaust fumes settling on the hot asphalt and concrete of this space.

A miracle occurred! I looked down today and saw the most wonderful flowers flourishing in this tiny unlikely place. I smiled in wonder. I thought to myself that if a flower could grow here, in this alien place, why couldn’t children flourish anywhere if their teachers and curriculum engaged their real curiosity? It isn’t the place or the amount of money that delivers information and education to the open minds of children; it is the fertile seeds we spread in their imaginations that engage their curiosity and lure them into learning. The human mind is a wondrous thing. Once it connects to an intriguing idea it doesn’t let go. Children are tenacious!

The worst possible disease for a young mind is boredom. Are we boring our children with information that is no longer applicable to their realities? Are our teachers bonded to curriculums that even they find irrelevant in our “Technological-Information Age”? Are we teaching subjects to children that offer no solutions to the problems they face? Let’s look at what we require them to learn in our public educational system and where they usually are mentally at each of these stages:

PRIMARY SCHOOL: Kindergarten age 5, and age 6 to 11 – grades 1 through 6

When children arrive in primary school they usually have a fixed classroom and one teacher for the entire day. The major goals of primary education rest in achieving basic literacy and numeracy for all children. These are important things; we have to read, speak, and calculate. It is also structured to establish a foundation in mathematics, science, geography, and history. As we all know, the priority of various matter and methods used to teach them are of considerable political debate.

This is the time in a child’s life when they are exploring their world. They ask a lot of questions and want to experience everything they imagine. Children love color. We should have them in huge rooms with lots of paint buckets, brushes, and huge pieces of paper, foam core board, or canvas so they can run amuck expressing themselves with vigilant assistance. They love music, but they love better to make music. Anything will do, old wooden sticks banging on pots, spoons banging on glass jars semi filled with water, or combs covered in tissue that make a harmonica. They will invent their own band with their imagination. They love bugs, and frogs, and worms, and bees, and butterflies. They love tinkering and dissecting into things. They love splashing in streams, gathering rocks, running in fields, and climbing trees. They love to build forts and hide out in them. They especially love to plant seeds and impatiently wait for them to grow into beanstalks! How can we fit these wondrous curiosities into their Primary School curriculum?

Brain studies prove these are the best years for a child to learn a foreign language but we don’t introduce this to them until Junior High School. What a waste!

MIDDLE SCHOOL: Generally age 12 through 14 – grades 7, 8 and 9

Upon arrival in Middle and/or Junior High School, students begin to enroll in class schedules where they take different subjects from several teachers in a given day. They move from room to room for instruction. The classes are usually a set of four or five core academic subjects. This core course includes English or “Language Arts”, Science, Mathematics, History or “Social Studies”, and in some schools a Foreign Language. They may also have two to four other classes, either electives or supplementary or remedial academic classes. When they complete Junior High School they will have had 9 years of core subjects in English language, 9 years of Mathematics and 9 years of Science.

This is the time in a child’s life where they are becoming aware of the other gender. Girls are interested in makeup; boys are strutting about like peacocks. They are curious about their bodies, their moods, their social structure within the group, and their appearance. They are experiencing puberty, a complex of emotional chemistry, and some frustrations. They have questions they don’t know how to ask and so they remain silent or talk amongst themselves. They love music, technology, games, and the outdoors if it doesn’t blow their hair in a mess.

I have often wondered why we don’t include courses during these years in Human Anatomy, Personal Hygiene, Social Manners, Communication Skills, Debate, Nutrition and Health, and Personal Grooming to name a few. Wouldn’t this ease their path into young adulthood?

HIGH SCHOOL: Generally age 15 through 17 – grades 10, 11 and 12

Upon arrival in high school a class period is the time allotted for one class session. The courses a student signs up for are arranged in a certain order to fit his or her individual schedule and generally do not change for the remainder of the school year, with the exception of semester courses. A period may vary in time, but it is usually 45 minutes long. There is wide variance in the curriculum required each year but many American high schools require the core courses; English, Science, Social Studies, Mathematics. The majority of high schools require four English credits to graduate. Generally, three science courses are required; Biology, Chemistry and Physics. Usually only three math credits are required for graduation; Geometry, Algebra I, Algebra II, Trigonometry, and Calculus are offered. The Social Studies include; World History, U.S. History, Government and sometimes Economics and Accounting are offered. Two to three years of Physical Education are required. There are also a number of electives allowed depending on where a child attends school.

During this time in a teenager’s life they are interested in and confronted by a host of challenges: Drugs, Alcohol, Tobacco, Sex, Family Upheavals, Peer Pressure, Emotional Stress, Image Building, Ego Wars, Obesity, Money Management, Family Financial Problems, and many other subtle influences. This is the time in their lives when they are searching for knowledge that may help them solve their existing or impending life issues.

The most important personal decision a person will make in their life is who they select to marry, for that is the person with whom they have and raise children. The most important significant financial decision a young person makes is the first house they buy. This commitment creates a lifelong debt.

Shouldn’t we be offering courses of instruction which include dating, courtship, engagement, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, child rearing, family structure, childhood education, and more? Shouldn’t we be offering instruction in financial matters such as; money handling, personal banking, savings accounts, checking accounts, balancing a check book, personal loans, budgeting? How about offering real estate courses; how to buy a home, financing options, real estate agents and real estate contracts, real estate laws, home inspection, closing costs, taxes, recording documents, home construction, or more?

Do you remember when you were doing these things for the first time? It was a little unnerving!  Some preparation would have helped to make better and more informed decisions.

Above all remember that by the time a student graduates from high school they will have had 12 years of English language, 12 years of Mathematics, and 12 years of Science. Why is it our children are unable to speak the English language articulately, compose a well written paragraph, prepare for a job interview, balance a checkbook, develop and manage a budget, understand the principles of nutrition, health, body balance in chemistry and biology, and other life enhancing, essential behaviors? To prove my point, ask your child to write a story, or tell you about vitamins and minerals that are indispensable for the body and good health, or create a budget and a financial plan for the month. Try it.

These are the things I think about when I look at my impatience growing on the pavement next to my garage.



Don’t take away my chance to succeed.

Now this takes the cake in light of the previous post on “Gifted Kindergarten” testing in New York.

Here are these New York parents vying for placement for their 4 year old children in the “Gifted Kindergarten” program and a report comes out in the July 29 edition of the Wall Street Journal, which says, “Erasing years of academic progress, state education officials (New York) on Wednesday acknowledged that hundreds of thousands of children had been misled into believing they were proficient in English and math, when in fact they were not.”

Now where does this leave these gifted 4 year olds who have worked hard in weekend “boot camps”, while giving up their childhood, so they could gain entrance into these New York public schools. This leaves them, with their childhood in ruin, attending a public school system that fails to educate them to acceptable standards. It is a system specializing in fantasy.

The Journal states, “The huge drops across the state raised questions about how much of the academic gains touted in the past several years were an illusion.” State officials were careful “…not to assign blame for the previously low standards, saying that the tests had become too predictable and tested too narrow a range of knowledge, thus becoming increasingly easier year after year.”

Isn’t this nice, State Officials, the Mayor, the Chancellor of the State Board of Regents, and all associated officials are careful not to offend or to place blame. If no one is to blame for the loss of proficiency in English or math in grades three through eight, Who Done It?  Maybe it’s the kids? Maybe they are too dumb to learn? Maybe it’s the parents? Who Done It?

The real tragedy is the social class who suffers from these deficiencies. It is always the defenseless, innocent children. They have no champions! According to these latest revelations, “The losses were also more pronounced for minority children. The number of black children proficient in English in third grade through eighth grade was cut nearly in half, to 34% from 64%. Among Hispanic children, 65% proficiency in English turned into 37%.” Who speaks for these children who are doomed to poverty without a proper education?

WHO SPEAKS FOR THEM? Is it the Mayor? Is it the Chancellor? Is it the teacher’s union? Is it the State officials? Is it the parents? How about the teachers, what do they have to say? Where are the champions for the children?Dear Lord, be good to me…

As a last statement on this pathetic situation in our educational system, I was told that most of the kids in the “Gifted Kindergarten” program attend private schools. They can afford it. They want a good education for their sons and daughters, not a public education.

What are we doing to our children? Where is our common sense? Who are these parents? What are they thinking? Why are they stealing childhood from these beautiful 4 year old innocents?

Blowing Bubbles in the Wind

Parents used to comfort their children in their arms. They used to put “bambaids” on their “boo-boos” when they fell down. Children used to play in backyard kiddy pools or run through front yard sprinklers screaming with joy. Their laughter used to fill the streets of family neighborhoods. Ice cream trucks were the gathering place in the evening with shouts of flavors and a little pushing here and there. Sandlot games and neighborhood competition were places of healthy physical ventilation for childhood frustration. Children used to ride bikes to school; roller skate to the houses of their friends, fly kites on windy days, skip rope, play hide and seek or kick the can. They were not fat, or obese.

Italian families ate a lot of pasta, no one got fat. Slavic and Irish families ate a lot of potatoes, no one got fat. Dinner was a family affair and everyone showed up, or else! The father was the head of the household and the mother ruled the roost. The children were protected, loved, sheltered, and treasured. They knew their boundaries and when they stepped out of bounds they were hardily pushed back in. I traveled once with a friend whose out of control 2 year old child became a distraction at every meal. Finally, I leaned over to my friend one evening, looked directly at the child, and told the mother, “In our household the parents controlled the children; the children did not control the parents.” I lost a friend and the child grew up to become an obnoxious adult who needed obsessive attention. Undisciplined children become undisciplined adults.

Now we have an educational system that has something called “gifted kindergarten” testing for entrance. Parents in New York are sold this ridiculous bill of goods and spend thousands of dollars on books and prep classes for their 4 year old sons and daughters so they can be admitted into these kindergarten programs. Many do not make “the cut” leaving parents devastated and children feeling inadequate.

Can you imagine, $90 workbooks, $145 an hour tutoring, and weekend “boot camps” for 4 year olds? One tutoring company, who services this industry in New York, says that parents of the 120 children her staff tutored spent an average of $1,000 on test prep for their 4 YEAR OLD CHILDREN! THAT’S $120,000!

Have parents lost their minds?

John Taylor Gatto is the author of Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling, and Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. He was the 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year.

I just read his article, The Public School Nightmare: Why fix a system designed to destroy individual thought? Please click on the link and read what this man has to say.

If you are a parent, a grandparent, a teacher, or thinking about having a child you MUST read this article. Even though I am unfamiliar with this man, he is stating the case for what I believed when I became a parent. I taught in the public school system after graduation from my university. I know what I experienced and I know how I felt about my students. I experienced the most amazing resistance from my principal and colleagues to innovation and creativity within the classroom. The rejection was discouraging. They did achieve their goals; I quit the system.

When I became pregnant I determined that our children would have a childhood filled with what Bertrand Russell describes below:

“Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling was among the most radical experiments in human history, that America was deliberately denying its children the tools of critical thinking. When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.”

Thinkers! I write about how we achieved this in my book , Peek-A-Boo, I See You.

When my children were very young I remember them asking a lot of questions. “Why?” After a while that word nearly drove me mad. Then one day I sat down and thought about “Why”.

Why can't I catch the water?

Guess what? They were curious about the things that surrounded them; the things they could not understand but saw or felt every day. Why does the wind blow? Why is the sky blue? Why don’t the stars fall down? Why do caterpillars become butterflies? Why is the snow white? Why is the rain wet? All children ask “Why”; it’s when they stop asking that they are in trouble. I still ask questions, having been allowed to do this most of my life. My sons still ask questions.

It seemed natural that children would be asking “Why” nearly every waking moment. Research indicates that pre-school children ask as many as 100 questions a day. It asserts that by the time they reach middle school they stop asking questions and this coincides with the time their motivation and interest plummet. Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman state in their Newsweek article, The Creativity Crisis, “They didn’t stop asking questions because they lost interest: it’s the other way around. They lost interest because they stopped asking questions.”

We send our children off to school when they are 6 so they can get answers to their questions. Why are they coming back to us with the light of excitement gone from their eyes? I’ll tell you why (no pun intended), it’s called “Drill and Kill”.

What is “Drill and Kill” learning?

The “Drill” is learning designed for rote memorization and National test results based upon answering the multiple choice questions correctly. The Drill part is the insanely boring educational practices we have adopted in our American curriculum. Teachers are required to teach a standard curriculum from a textbook and chalkboard. The students are required to memorize the answers to questions that may be asked on the tests administered by the teachers or National Boards. If they pass the tests they are advanced to the next grade level and the school gets high marks for teaching to the test.

The “Kill” part is insidious. It quietly creeps into the psyche of the children and wraps itself around their boredom and they become disinterested. They quit asking questions because they realize their questions don’t matter; what matters is the right answer to the question on the test. They die inside accepting the process because they don’t know any better and there is no reward in asking questions.

What is Problem-Based learning?

This is a curriculum driven by real world inquiry. It’s about the “Why” they began asking when they were old enough to talk. It is about having children solve problems in their classroom courses that require them to develop solutions to dilemmas they confront in the real world. It is about improving life through creative thinking, not through memorization. For example, when our sons asked why the heart beats they went with our home school teacher to the local slaughter company and asked for a cow’s heart, which they gave them in a neat package. They brought it back and dissected it in order to discover the answers to their questions. This led them to an array of more questions and more discoveries; arteries, veins, pumps, blood, chambers, etc., and pretty soon we had an anatomy class going strong. This then led them into healthy hearts, nutrition, gardening, food preparation, herbs, and then into vitamins and minerals. I discuss this in Peek-A-Boo, I See You!

The problem was how does a heart beat? They solved the question by their investigation and creative thinking process. Creativity does not just exist in an art class. It is rampant throughout the educational process, but rarely used. Fact finding and research are vital stages in the creative process. Think about this. How do creative thinkers solve problems in any skill? They first have to ask the question; then they research what exists; they accumulate the facts; finally, after research and fact-finding, they create alternative solutions to problems they are trying to solve.

There is a public middle school in Akron, Ohio called the National Inventors Hall of Fame School. Like all states, Ohio has curriculum standards. Their fifth grade teachers came up with a project for the class. Read below an excerpt from the Newsweek article:

The key is in how kids work through the vast catalog of information. Consider the National Inventors Hall of Fame School, a new public middle school in Akron, Ohio. Mindful of Ohio’s curriculum requirements, the school’s teachers came up with a project for the fifth graders:

PROBLEM: Figure out how to reduce the noise in the library. Its windows faced a public space and, even when closed, let through too much noise. The students had four weeks to design proposals. (emphasis mine)

Working in small teams, the fifth graders first engaged in what creativity theorist Donald Treffinger describes as fact-finding. How does sound travel through materials? What materials reduce noise the most? Then, problem-finding—anticipating all potential pitfalls so their designs are more likely to work. Next, idea-finding: generate as many ideas as possible. Drapes, plants, or large kites hung from the ceiling would all baffle sound. Or, instead of reducing the sound, maybe mask it by playing the sound of a gentle waterfall? A proposal for double-paned glass evolved into an idea to fill the space between panes with water. Next, solution-finding: which ideas were the most effective, cheapest, and aesthetically pleasing? Fiberglass absorbed sound the best but wouldn’t be safe. Would an aquarium with fish be easier than water-filled panes?

Then teams developed a plan of action. They built scale models and chose fabric samples. They realized they’d need to persuade a janitor to care for the plants and fish during vacation. Teams persuaded others to support them—sometimes so well, teams decided to combine projects. Finally, they presented designs to teachers, parents, and Jim West, inventor of the electric microphone.

Along the way, kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, Principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.

Creativity in children is about divergent thinking, generating many unique ideas, and convergent thinking, combining those ideas into the best result for the solution to the problem. Creativity is the production of original ideas that are useful. Children have the most amazing ability to craft the most creative ideas to any problem they encounter. They are fresh, innocent, and have no preconceptions. They are naturally enthusiastic and filled with excitement and energy.

Free our teachers from curriculum based standards that offer little room for creativity and turn them loose into standards that allow them to promote creativity in their students. I’ll bet teachers would become more enthusiastic and creative about their courses. Their students would become excited again about learning, working in groups, and competing.

Americans love competition!